Spectral estimation of plasma fluctuations. I. Comparison of methods

The relative root mean squared errors (RMSE) of nonparametric methods for spectral estimation is compared for microwave scattering data of plasma fluctuations. These methods reduce the variance of the periodogram estimate by averaging the spectrum over a frequency bandwidth. As the bandwidth increases, the variance decreases, but the bias error increases. The plasma spectra vary by over four orders of magnitude, and therefore, using a spectral window is necessary. The smoothed tapered periodogram is compared with the adaptive multiple taper methods and hybrid methods. It is found that a hybrid method, which uses four orthogonal tapers and then applies a kernel smoother, performs best. For 300 point data segments, even an optimized smoothed tapered periodogram has a 24% larger relative RMSE than the hybrid method. Two new adaptive multitaper weightings which outperform Thomson’s original adaptive weighting are presented.